Lady Doyle added that since Great Britain boasts so many women, if they got the vote they would indeed manage the country. “Who would want to live under the rule of woman?” she asked. She laughed a high sound.
“Suffragist that I am, I confess I wouldn’t!” agreed Marshall.
In the piece that followed, Marshall called Doyle the “biggest, blondest, breeziest Englishman we have seen in many a long day. He has that physical fitness kept by so few Americans in late middle life; that erectness and absence of superfluous tissue which mean just one thing—regular outdoor exercise. He played in a hard game of football at the age of forty-two.” Alongside the story ran a cartoon of a lynch mob going after an old woman labeled “suffragette.”
Later that day, Doyle visited the Tombs, the new eight-story prison located in lower Manhattan. Doyle desperately wanted to meet Charles Becker, the New York City police officer who had been convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of a small-time bookmaker named Herman Rosenthal. The sensational case had held the attention of newspaper readers for months. “It’s against the rules,” said the warden, shaking his head. Instead, Doyle was allowed an extensive private tour. They started on the lowest level, in the furnace room, and worked their way up through closets, coal bins, the cramped exercise yard, and the shadowy grates in the doors that separated murderers from the open world. Doyle searched every corner, according to the Evening World, “just as if they were looking for a clue to some enthralling mystery.”
Doyle pronounced it “a most superior prison.” “Do you think it would do for the incarceration of suffragettes?” a reporter asked.
“It would make an excellent place for that,” Doyle replied, with a wink.
The next day, young suffrage activist Inez Milholland Boissevain read Doyle’s quote. She was angry at it, but she still laughed. She wrote off a response to the papers.
Sir Arthur is one of the minor novelists, and still more, he is one of the minor prophets. Englishmen of Sir Arthur’s chuckle-headed type say exasperating things like that about the militants one minute, and the next minute beseech them to bury the hatchet. Well, they’ll bury it.
Doyle read this and harrumphed. This was getting out of hand. The Doyles were leaving for their long vacation soon, but they had a few days left in Gotham to fix this. Doyle knew that his best defense was to fall back on his old practical detective. So the next time he spoke with reporters, Doyle went to his bread and butter. Sherlock Holmes had been his breakthrough as a writer, but, though Doyle was certainly grateful to the old chap, he had retired him in 1893 in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” where Holmes fell to his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls, locked in combat with his mortal enemy, Professor Moriarty. The irony, Doyle knew, is that it was the frustrating mysteries surrounding Holmes himself that was part of the great draw of his stories. But he was not about to tell his readers that. Sherlock Holmes stories were sellouts whenever they appeared in The Strand, Collier’s, and The American Magazine.
In truth, Doyle just wanted to write different sorts of books, having articulated Holmes since 1887. But the public was always restless, and perhaps Doyle was too, so he returned to the detective in 1901, resurrecting him outright in 1903.
“A Cornish fisherman was the worse critic I had,” Doyle told the reporters. “He told me, ‘Well, sur, Sherlock Holmes may not have killed himself falling over that cliff. But he did injure himself something terrible. He’s never been the same since!’” The crowd clapped. Doyle, basking again in the adoration of his readers, couldn’t resist adding that, given the amount of crime he was hearing about in New York, “the history of America would be better if you could get a shipload of Sherlocks over here.” He pronounced it Shrrlock.
Before he left New York, Arthur Conan Doyle took the time to film brief cameos in several motion pictures. He and his wife appeared for a moment in episode 22 of Our Mutual Girl, a comedic serial detailing the adventures of a young woman in New York. In the short episode, Doyle confers with Burns on a case. Doyle also appeared as himself in both The $5,000,000 Counterfeiting Plot, a dramatic serial about a Burns case, and in Universal Animated Weekly number 117, a more traditional newsreel that covered his arrival in America.
After filming completed and they said good-bye to Burns, the Doyles left New York. They made their way to Alberta in a private train car—complete with their own parlor—where they sat in chairs and watched as the wilderness rolled out beside them like an endless painting. When they returned home to England, the First World War had begun. By the first of July 1916, the Somme River in France, normally full of rich, flowing water, ran red with blood. The Battle of the Somme cost twenty thousand British soldiers in a single day. One of the men on the edge of these impossible numbers was Kingsley Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son, who was gravely wounded but miraculously survived. He was still recovering from his injuries when the flu came sweeping across Europe in 1918. Kingsley, who was twenty-five, became ill and died. The Doyles were devastated.
The papers said that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been, off and on, a proponent and practitioner of spiritualism—that is, the practice of so-called psychical research to communicate with the dead. After his son’s tragic passing, Doyle told friends that he turned back to spiritualism because “the war has shown us the breakdown of nearly every social and religious system we held dear.” He turned out lights, lit candles, and spoke words into the air.
“Some time ago,” continued Doyle, “I said I knew of thirteen mothers—thirteen—who were receiving direct messages from sons who passed away. Doubt was expressed—gentle doubt—by a newspaper, which asked: ‘Who are the mothers? What are their names?’ Well, I know thirty mothers now who are receiving these messages.
“Millions of men and women are looking,” Doyle said, “as they never have done before for a sign and a consolation.” The war, and sickness, had brought death to every doorstep at a quicker pace than usual. Parents were looking for their children everywhere they could, even in the corners beyond death. What Doyle was describing was an older, deeper mystery.
Doyle often quoted Dr. James Hyslop, a psychologist who was active in psychic research through scientific means and logic. Hyslop said that in attempting to communicate with the dead, “all that interests me is that it comes, and that it corresponds with evidence in this world.”
“There is no death,” claimed the author of Sherlock Holmes. “Only a veil.”
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True Detective Mysteries
A single electric bulb looped down from the uneven ceiling. It sparked hot white. A man with dark features stepped into the bright circle below it, which lit up a scar near his left eye.